Thursday, May 22, 2014

From my blog post on May 19th, I did promise to let you know the areas on Pressbook where I
ran into trouble. That way, if you hit the same snags, you’d know what to do. So
here’s my sad tale….

First of all, I overthought it. In other words, I expected
it to be a lot more difficult than it really was. If you think of the site as a
template where you insert the information into its slots, it will make more
sense.

So - the first thing that gave me trouble was the Copyright
area. I don’t know why I ran into a problem there since all you need to do is
insert the regular spiel about this being a work of fiction and all rights
reserved, etcetera, in the space provided on the Info page and it will come out just fine. I
guess I thought it had to go into
the front matter and ended up with two pages. One they created and the one I
added.

Another thing I didn’t pay attention to was the Publish box
on the right hand side of each page where it has the Export
settings. It’s important to tick the top two spaces for the linked table of
contents because the program will organize it for you. That’s so cool!!

Include
in exports

Show
title in exports

Also- when
I did my first book, I had two chapter headings and it looked horrible. I couldn’t figure out why that happened until
I asked the same friend that told me about Pressbook.

The way you
fix this is to go to the left side panel of tabs and choose Appearance – themes
- and when you choose the theme setup you’d like, then go to theme details and
then theme options and where it says Global Options, make sure that the box
beside Display Chapter numbers is left empty. Now save it. That will clear away the
double headings.

Another of
my favorite things about Pressbook is that I had wracked my brain trying to
come up with the correct way to insert a cover image into a word doc that
wouldn’t disappear when I uploaded the file to Amazon. So many times, I ended
up with a little camera instead of the picture. I tried the insert image with
my windows 10 and for me it wouldn’t take.( I must have been doing something
wrong….Ya think?) When I spotted the add media button on Pressbook, my heart did a little leap for joy because I knew that
this problem was now solved. And... I was right. It’s great!! I’ve even begun adding
my author photo on My Page just ‘cause I can :-))))

The last
thing that threw me was when I had to upgrade because my file was too large. I
had no idea what to do until I saw the Upgrade tab. It took me to a place where I set up a visa number and paid the $10. Once that was done, it let
me finish loading everything and then Export the files in the three formats –
mobi, epubs & pdf. Again, I had no problem downloading the files they
formatted and checking them out through Caliber. But when I saw something I wanted
to change, for some reason it didn’t dawn on me that I had to actually hit that
darn big RED “Export your Book” tab again. Took me some time before that became clear….duhhh!! In fact, you can export as many
times as you want. So, making corrections to the files is very simple.

Like most new things,
once you’ve used this tool, I promise you it will become easier. I still
haven’t delved into the other parts of the program like comments, users and
utilities but I’ll get to it. If you go to their help page, as I did, there is
lots there so you won’t feel alone or... you can always e-mail me:-)

***If any of you
reading this have anything else to add about your experiences with Pressbook, please do so in the
comments so we can all learn more from each other.

The yellow Rose is for friendship!!﻿

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2 comments:

Mimi, You are so helpful and generous with your time. This sounds like the perfect way to epub a book without the big learning curve of other methods. Thanks for all the useful information for the rest of us. :)Sylvia